Just had the whole fibreop package installed out here in the metro area (St. John's) and the internet is awesome. The tv however looks a little bit sketchy.
What do you guys think about it? Is anyone else a little unimpressed?

had a few other questions for you guys too!

1. does anyone else get the strange compression effect? as in the black bars on either side of the picture.......is this fixable or are we just supposed to deal with it? this is on standard def by the way.

2. is it just me or does the standard def pale in comparison to rogers ? seems like its very grainy. i understand that no one is really into the standard def anymore though so try not to crap on me too much for being cheap lol

3. are both of these reasons a way of coaxing you into paying the extra 15 bucks a month for hd channels?!

thanks guys....looking forward to seeing if anyone else has issues with the tv service

I think this is in the version of Mediaroom that Aliant uses: press the "Enter/Aspect" button to change the aspect to stretch, Zoom1, 2, 3.

I haven't seen Aliant's picture, but I suspect it looks fine on an SD TV. If you have an HD TV, you should get the HD channels to get the most from your TV.

It sounds like you're on the "Good" bundle. According to Aliant's web page, the "Best" bundle costs $20 more and for that you get Whole Home HD & PVR and Internet 30/30. If you don't want the PVR and faster Interent, the HD channels are $12.95.

My FibreOp install is booked for today (all-day appointment, arghhh). I am switching from Bell Satellite. I will hopefully be able to do a side by side picture quality comparison shortly. I will advise.

The installation takes pretty much day anyway, so the all day appointments aren't as bad as they sound.

I just switched from Bell ExpressVu to FibreOp, and I find there has been a slight but definite decline in picture quality. High def sports broadcasts do not look as good on Fibre Op. more noise and motion artifacts than I saw on BEV and just not as "crisp". Hoping for bit re-allocation in the future to improve this...

Hi everyone,
I'm looking into changing from BEV to BA FibreOp as well simply because BEV have been constantly raising my fees and I'm working out if FibreOp will save me any money as I type this.

The real question though is quality. Is FibreOp any good. I just read someone's post stating that the picture quality is not as good as BEV. That for me would be a big deal. As well I have heard rumours that internet usage can affect the TV quality and vice versa. Is there any truth to this?

As promised, I've spent some time comparing the video quality between Aliant FibreOP and Bell Satellite. First, I should point out that I do almost all of my viewing in HD. Overall, I am quite pleased with the picture quality of the FibreOP. Three small issues that I have noticed:

1. There seems to be quite a bit of edge enhancement going on with the FibreOP feed, which for some will be seen as adding "pop" to the image, but I find it a bit artificial at times. I suspect this is at least partially attributable to different compression codecs being used. I am gradually getting used to this and finding it less jarring.

2. There are noticeable motion artifacts with fast moving objects, for example, when the camera pans over the ice surface of a hockey game. I found the artifacts to be more prevalent in the FibreOP feed than the Bell Sat feed.

3. Several times, when viewing dark scenes, it was apparent that the black levels on the FibreOP feed were clipped (the darkest parts were simply blended together in a single black mass). Noticed this during several dark scenes when watching Game of Thrones on HBO.

The overall level of detail in both pictures was very similar in my opinion. I would give a slight edge to the FibreOP with regard to colour saturation, but this may be at the expense of dark image detail as mentioned in #3. Unfortunately, the SD video quality on FibreOP is Terrible, as expected; slightly worse than Bell Sat which is also borderline intolerable.

For the record, both sources were viewed on a single television, using separate HDMI inputs and identical picture settings. I consider this a work in progress, and I'm optimistic about the future potential of FibreOP, particularly given the capacity they will have to deliver on-demand programming at a very high quality.

I will have an active Bell Sat account for another few weeks or so. I will try to do some more viewing comparisons and keep you updated.

I know this is a couple year old thread, but curious if fibre op has improved at all in HD picture quality compared to what some of you were saying before? Looking at bundling internet, tv together and wondering if I should just get satellite tv instead?

It did, yeah. I got it back when it was new, and dumped the TV side due to the picture quality. Got it back later (around when "Fibreop 2.0" rolled out) and it was much improved. Last time I compared, I found it better than Rogers in NB on the sports channels, but that was over a year ago.

Compression artifacting is pretty obvious when you get up close to your screen. You see like this dithering effect. On Bell Expressvu, the image is much less compressed and just looks sharper and crisper.
By a lot, actually. It's like a 5 meg .tiff vs a 100k .jpg. Gets uglier the bigger the screen you have.

720p isn't cutting it. Maybe it's the codecs they use or something I don't know. But if I download an episode of a TV show, say a 720p torrent of say, Survivor or The Walking Dead... the 720p torrent looks WAY better than my 720p bell aliant picture watching the same show.

Ie, other networks 720p visual fidelity is much higher than Bell Aliant's.

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